Evil Dead: The Musical
New World Stages

Granted, George Reinblatt's merciless send-up of this Hollywood horror isn't wedded to a musical score of equal distinction. And yes, the late-night cult cachet that Evil Dead aspires to is frankly ripped off from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But outfitted with its undeniably original Splatter Zone, ED is s-o-o-o-o much fun, a happening with its own twisted identity.

Perry Tannenbaum
Date Reviewed:
February 2007
Fever, The
Acorn Theater

Starting with wry observations on theatregoing, Wallace Shawn is a fine monologist, an observer/commentator whose tales draw us in, while his insights and humor hold us. In The Fever, there is a lot about the lot of the poor and visits to poor countries, some with revolutions, including Karl Marx's analysis of value and the relationship between product and people, and a ramble on terrorism. There are also comments on a nude beach and on Christmas present-wrapping.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2007
American Pilot, The
City Center

David Greig's The American Pilot, now at Manhattan Theater Club, pits a bunch of really stupid people -- villagers in an Eastern country where English is not spoken -- against an equally stupid American pilot whom they have discovered with a broken leg and brought to a hut in their village. Would people who don't speak each other's language keep screaming insistently at each other as if the noise alone would communicate the idea? It's not rational, not a survival tactic for villagers or soldier.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
December 2006
Bhutan
Cherry Lane Theater

Daisy Foote's Bhutan is a jigsaw puzzle with pieces from past and present jumbled together until, gradually, the picture of a Massachusetts working-class family and its dynamics, its conflicts with each other and with the world, becomes clear. It's a domestic drama with realism underlined by the stylized presentation.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2006
Adi Braun
Iridium

I had a surreal experienced at the Sunday Jazz Brunch at Iridium on 51st and Broadway. Here's a fine singer, Adi Braun, with a wide and flexible range of voice and songs, doing a sophisticated performance for an audience of tourists and their kids having lunch. So this brave, talented singer had to stand up there doing her thing, paying no attention to the conversational murmur (with an occasional high-pitched "Daddy, can I have some more?" drifting thru the room). She's a trouper -- did it with a smile and the vocal subtleties of a top-notch jazz singer.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2006
Clean House, The
Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House is a bit of a mish mash; it has elements of farce, and it's also about dying of cancer. Early on, it seems an inane attempt to be amusing, with the maid (Vanessa Aspillaga) as psychotherapist. Jill Clayburgh gives a terrific performance as a quirky, insecure, repressed housewife obsessed with cleaning, and Blair Brown is fine as the odd MD; Act 2 has some nice stylized movement and dance, and it seems a totally different play.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2006
Fantasticks, The
Snapple Theater Center

The Fantasticks, now playing at the Snapple Theater Center, is a sweet, old fashioned, silly, romantic comedy with terrific songs that stick in your mind. What a pleasure to walk out humming "Try to Remember" or "Soon It's Gonna Rain." With a fine cast including the beautiful, clear-voiced Sara Jean Ford as the girl, Burke Moses as El Gallo and the extraordinary physical comedian Robert R.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2006
Confessions of an Irish Rebel
Irish Arts Center

Confessions of an Irish Rebel, now at the Irish Arts Center on West 51st Street, gives us the real flavor of Ireland in a show full of wit and wisdom in story and song. You're in a pub with a charming, smart, marvelous storyteller who sings the old tunes and becomes the many characters he talks about, each with a unique persona and voice. As Behan, Shay Duffin is the guy you'd actually love to meet in an Irish pub.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2006
Barbara's Blue Kitchen
Lamb's Theater

They don't make many actresses as good as Lori Fischer. They don't make many country singers as good as Lori Fischer. They don't make many writers who can write with the depth and insight into character of Lori Fischer, or create her range of melodies that can make you smile or make you feel pangs of emotion. This great talent is on view at the Lamb's Theater, where she stars in her musical, Barbara's Blue Kitchen. It's an amazing performance of an exposition of people in a little town in Tennessee.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
August 2006
Billy the Mime
Players Theater

Did you see "The Aristocrats"? The sequence by Billy the Mime was one of the funniest. Billy the Mime is now playing in the NY Fringe, and it's a "Don't Miss!" He's one of the best mimes in the country with clean clear technique, a great sense of humor and perfect timing.

Although influenced by Marcel Marceau, Billy has his own sensibility and his own contemporary view of the world. He keeps his audience entertained from start to finish with nary a dull moment.

This is solo mime at its very best by a highly skilled, totally engaging performer.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
August 2006
Fartiste, The
Harry De Jur Playhouse

In Paris in the 1890s there was a popular music-hall performer called "Le Petomaine" who played tunes by passing gas. He was a huge star for about a decade.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
August 2006
French Defense, The
Abrons Arts Center at Henry Street Settlement

The French Defense by Dimitri Raitzin is a fascinating look at a chess contest by then World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik (Robert J. D'Amato) and challenger Mikhail Tal (Daniel Hendricks Simon) in 1960. I'm not a chess player, but I was completely drawn into the drama of the contest between a champ and an annoying, insulting gadfly, and by the depth of the characterization by the actors, particularly D'Amato.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
August 2006
Bush Is Bad
Triad Theater

Bush is Bad is a first-class political satire that goes far beyond the obvious. The three highly talented performers -- Janet Dickinson, Neal Mayer, and Michael McCoy -- are comedians with strong musical voices and actors who can fully realize the many characters each plays.  Janet as Condoleeza Rice is brilliant, including a riff on the piano.

Richmond Shephard
Date Reviewed:
July 2006
Field, The
Irish Repertory

In John B. Keane's The Field, strongly directed by Ciaran O'Reilly at the Irish Rep, an elemental battle in rural Ireland in 1964 pits a brutal cattle farmer, who needs the field for grazing and access to water, against and another man who needs the field so he can put in a quarry business (so that his sick wife can return to Ireland). It's the irresistible force meeting the immovable object; neither can compromise.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
June 2006
Cirque du Soleil: Corteo
Cirque du Soleil at Grand Chapiteau on Randall's Island

Through the years, Cirque De Soleil's shows have grown in sophistication as they explore new themes in entertainment in which the human body goes beyond ordinary circus skills into unbelievable, thrilling dimensions full of surprises.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
May 2006
Defiance
Manhattan Theater Club - Stage I

John Patrick Shanley is one of America's greatest playwrights. He is so sparkling bright with words, uses language with such inspiration as he digs deep into the souls of his characters, that he is hard to match in dramatic depth and ironic humor. Seemingly, his play Defiance, now at The Manhattan Theater Club, is a profound look at discrimination in the US Marines in 1971. Main characters are a white Marine Colonel, his wife, a black Captain and a white minister from Alabama.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2006
Barefoot in the Park
Cort Theater

For some good old theatrical fun, check out the current production of Neil Simon's early play,  Barefoot in the Park, now on Broadway. Directed with clever action, business, and timing by Scott Elliott, chock full of good jokes by Simon, the story of a newlywed couple's first New York apartment, the bride's mother and an adventurous neighbor, will hold you, tickle you, totally engage you.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
February 2006
Almost, Maine
Daryl Roth Theater

John Cariani, the quirky actor who played Motel in the recent Fiddler on the Roof, has written a quirky bunch of short plays taking place in snowy Almost, Maine. Much of it is gentle theater—a very sweet look at shy people in rural America as they mate and mismate. Jumping from the surreal to the sweetly sentimental, the first-class cast of four wonderfully versatile actors, Finnerty Steeves, Todd Cerveris, Justin Hagan and Miriam Shor, all in multiple roles, give us a pleasant, amusing evening of romance in rustic America.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2006
Apartment 3A
Arc Light Theater

Jeff Daniels's engrossing romantic comedy Apartment 3A has some of the best acting in town. Amy Landecker, as a betrayed woman who moves into a new shabby apartment, is a mesmerizing stage presence who plays pain, joy, sexuality, feistyness, and even complacence with a believability that is rare anywhere. As she encounters two suitors, a co-worker at a TV station (Arian Moayed) and a stranger who appears at her door Joseph Collins), both quite convincingly acted, her life turns and twists into a guessed solution that works fine.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2006
Abigail's Party
Acorn Theater

Jennifer Jason Leigh is a great actress. In Mike Leigh's 1977 play, Abigail's Party, now on Theater Row, she is amazing as she turns artifice into reality, broad caricature in movement, voice, accent, physicality, and attitude into a totally believable human character. She plays a narcissistic pretentious working class woman who believes she is some kind of princess, and Max Baker as her cringing husband brings a matching piece of work to the stage.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2006
Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life
Gerald Schoenfeld Theater

Chita Rivera, The Dancer's Life, written by Terrence McNally, is not only a survey of the great singer/dancer's life and adventures, it's a great story of fifty years of American Musical Theater, and a fabulous performance by one of the most talented, liveliest stars ever to appear on Broadway. Okay, at 73 her leg doesn't kick as high. So what? Her persona is here, her charm, her radiance, even most of her voice. It's a privilege to spend a couple of hours with a star of this magnitude as she shows and tells us her fascinating life.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
January 2006
Ashley Montana Goes Ashore in the Caicos
Flea Theater

Ashley Montana Goes Ashore in the Caicos, or, What Am I Doing Here? is the name of a show by Roger Rosenblatt directed by Jim Simpson. By it's end, I, too, felt the way of the "or."

I went because that great star and Tony winner, Bebe Neuwirth, is in it. Essentially, Ashley Montana features a four-person sketch-comedy troupe with competent performers, some cute, lightly political bits, clever plays on words and fun non sequiturs, but only some jokes work, and lots of the material doesn't. When one hits, we keep wishing more would.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2005
Bach at Leipzig
New York Theater Workshop

Bach at Leipzig is an intriguing title. It stirs hopes of an Amadeus, perhaps a Souvenir or a Travesties. Alas and alack. Itamar Moses has a splendid idea -- let six musicians (the requisite number of voices in a fugue) in 1722 compete for the job of music master, let them discuss fugues and end with a verbal fugue. Unfortunately, director Pam MacKinnon, who is excellent at moving people around on the stage, doesn't control their hysterics and declamations when they speak.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2005
Captain Louie
Little Shubert Theater

Captain Louie is an inept kids show performed by kids who sing well but leave a lot to be desired in the acting department. But the play's the thing that sinks the project. Based on "The Trip" by Ezra Jack Keats, the book for the show, by Anthony Stein, is condescending, trite, saccharine, and basically at such a low level that my grandnephew, Mathew Sprague, who is nine, said, "It was kinda young for me." Scenes where Louis goes back to his old neighborhood are based on rejection without motivation and throw the whole mess further out of whack.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
November 2005
Devil of Delancey Street, The
78th Street Theater Lab

Richard Nixon famously remarked, "I am not a crook!" Let me paraphrase that and say, "I am not a crank!" I don't go to the theatre looking for trouble, but like all critics, I do occasionally find it. Such was the case on a recent lovely autumn evening in Manhattan.

David Dow Bentley
Date Reviewed:
October 2005
Five Course Love
Minetta Lane Theater

In Gregg Coffin's Five Course Love, now at the Minetta Lane Theater, three vastly talented singer/comedians, Heather Ayers, John Bolton and Jeff Gurner, broadly directed by Emma Griffin, sing their way through five ethnic restaurants.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
October 2005
Lips Together, Teeth Apart
Poway Performing Arts Company

What happens when four blatant heterosexuals spend the Fourth of July on Fire Island? They also bring their own problems to the festivities. Terrence McNally's Lips Together, Teeth Apart is a challenging work. On PowPAC's stage, under the direction of Jay Mower, the challenges are met.

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
October 2005
Dedication, or the Stuff of Dreams
59E59 Theater

In Dedication, or The Stuff of Dreams, Terence McNally's thoughts about theater and the human condition, now at Primary Stages , are played out and soliloquized on the stage of a crumbled old theater. The incomparable Nathan Lane speaks for McNally, and his monologues work because it's Lane.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
August 2005
Elements of Style
13th Street Theater

A play about Proofreading? Sure. Why not? I was once married to the entertainment editor of a daily newspaper, and her bible was a book called "Elements of Style," and that's the name of the terrific play Wendy Weiner wrote and performs. She plays a number of characters including the prim Chief, her hip-hop daughter, the vulgar fact-checker, an English features editor, a rural guy who works at magazines because he likes girls. This is a show about people involved with language, punctuation, etc., and all of Weiner's characterizations are clever, insightful, and fun.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
August 2005
Fatal Attraction: A Greek Tragedy
East 13th Street Theater

One supposes we are now in the era where dramatic films from twenty years ago are fair game for broad spoofing, and I guess with its overheated tale of an adulterous affair gone mental, Adrian Lyne's 1987 hit, "Fatal Attraction," is as good a choice as any. In their re-examination of the movie as a sexist manifesto, writers Alana McNair and Kate Wilkinson (who also star in the two lead female roles) employ a Greek chorus as a means to explore the potboiler.

Jason Clark
Date Reviewed:
July 2005
Chosen
Producers Club

What happens when good intentions, self-righteousness, egotism and cluelessness collide? This workshop production offers ample demonstration.

David Steinhardt
Date Reviewed:
May 2005
Hairspray
Marcus Center For The Performing Arts

More than two-and-a-half years after it took Broadway by storm, Hairspray finally makes its Milwaukee debut. Reality-takes-a-holiday in this goofy musical, which by now should be familiar to theater fans everywhere. As a longtime fan of the John Waters' low-budget 1988 film (by the same name), this reviewer was somewhat skeptical whether this campy charmer could be translated successfully to the stage. However, one should never underestimate the limitless talents of director Jack O'Brien.

Anne Siegel
Date Reviewed:
May 2005
Altar Boyz
Dodger Stages

Altar Boyz is a hot show, fun from start to finish. It's a five-man singing/dancing/jumpin' troupe with a twist: mock Christian religious content, but the irreverence is actually reverent, and the boyz are the cutest, the jokes are funny (and that's good in a comedy), and they are all fine singers.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Dessa Rose
Lincoln Center - Mitzi Newhouse Theater

Dessa Rose, by Lynn Ahrens (book and lyrics) and Stephen Flaherty (music), is a well-meaning musical about love and slavery. It starts in 1847 when a sixteen-year-old, pregnant slave takes part in a minor slave uprising. The story feels trite and quite melodramatic, as bad Massa kills a slave and sells young Dessa. The singing is terrific - LaChanze as Dessa, Norm Lewis, Kecia Lewis, and all the rest of the ensemble - but there is little joy in the show, which often feels like a Greek drama, with most of the action talked or sung about.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
God Hates the Irish
Rattlestick Theater

God Hates The Irish: The Ballad of Armless Johnny, by Sean Cunningham, with music by Michael Frears, is a very black, absurdist musical comedy about the tribulations of an armless Irish man, played by the very engaging Bill Thompson, a good singer, comedian and actor with very elastic legs. The cast are all strong personas, including the bright, shiny Broadway-level Ann Bobby, Remy Auberjonois, the lovely Anna Camp, Lisa Altomare and James A. Stephens. It's all non-PC jokes, full of sexual outrageousness.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
April 2005
Bat Boy
Don Powell Theater

The occasional sound of bats flying overhead is heard during the pre-show for the San Diego premiere of Bat Boy: The Musical. Billed as a musical comedy/horror show, it is truly a send-up of the 1950s horror films and much more. Dr. Rick Simas directs this Off Broadway hit of 2001 for San Diego State University's theater.

Bat Boy, sired by a bat and a human, lived in a cave until his teens. He is discovered by the three trailer-trash teens (Kevin Maldarelli, Kelsey Vener, and Omri Schein) of Mrs. Taylor (Jamie Kalama).

Robert Hitchcox
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
All Wear Bowlers
HERE Arts Center

What can a critic say about a show which includes in its program an essay by the performer/creators, informing us that "we seemed to strike the perfect balance between talk and play, philosophy and slapstick? And with a director who boasts a "PhD from Stanford in drama theory and criticism on top of that? all wear bowlers, lowercase letters and all, presents itself as a pre-deconstructed masterpiece that has been “in development 3 years.” Only problem is, it's not very good.

David Steinhardt
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Bindlestiff Family Cirkus: From the Gutter to the Glitter
Theater For The New City

The Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, now at the Theater for the New City, offer the real deal: unabashed, old fashioned vaudeville and sideshow, without embellishments, performed by an accomplished duo with great circus skills: Keith Nelson and Stephanie Monseu. Also on hand in From the Gutter to the Glitter are the fun musical duo, pianist Peter Bufano (who also juggles) and zippy violinist Kathe Hostetter.

Richmond Shepard
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Coriolanus
John Jay College

Responding to the comment that Shakespeare never blotted a line, Dr. Johnson quipped, "Would that he had blotted a thousand." Johnson might well have had in mind several rocky out-croppings in the stream of Coriolanus, a decidedly rhetorical play, to change my metaphor. Much of the text is reportage: something has happened elsewhere. Still more text consists in tales to be re-told, though these, blessedly, are planned for some off stage events (in Act One, scenes 1, 4, 7, 10; nearly as much in Act Two, and thereafter).

Nina daVinci Nichols
Date Reviewed:
March 2005
Blogging About Cat Stevens
Shetler Studio Theater

Monologues appeal to the voyeur in us. Details of someone else's life - we can't ever get enough of them - especially when they're presented in such a persuasive way as in this collection. A few themes run through the 12 lives on view. Blogging is one. Private thoughts made public; it's as if blogs were invented for exhibitionists. Just like these actors. Another theme is pain, but usually that's told to us only after the character gets us through the more mundane part.

David Lipfert
Date Reviewed:
February 2005

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